PreneurCast109: Starting Something Stupid with Richie Norton

This week, Pete talks to Richie Norton, author of The Power of Starting Something Stupid, about his book, and about getting the most from your life and your business by getting started and trying out your ideas.

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Dom: Indeed, indeed. It’s morning for me. I just got back from my morning swim.

Pete: Fantastic, well, I went for my afternoon run, so it’s a heavy balance.

Dom: I almost feel like I can join in this conversation now because I do go for a swim in the morning.

Pete: I know, it’s impressive. You’re active. It’s freaking me out.

Dom: I’ve seen daylight, it’s amazing. Cool. Folks, this week is a conversation, just to give you an idea of what we’re going to be doing this week. It’s an inspirational conversation with Pete and a chap called Richie Norton, who’s the author of a book called The Power of Starting Something Stupid.

I was looking forward to this conversation. It’s a fantastic book. And before we get into that, Pete, you’ve been busy. Well, I’ve been recovering from my digital publishing extravaganza. You’ve been busy in the background this week, haven’t you?

Pete: Yeah, well, me, not so much, but the team. People who do play along at home probably may have noticed by now that we’ve had a soft launch of a brand new website, or at least a skin and design of PreneurMarketing.com. The blog (it’s the focus point for a lot of stuff we do), it’s had a refresh and a revamp, with a lot more content-focused, a bit more Web 4.0, whatever version we’re up to now of the internet.

It seems to keep changing. Something really cool, so it’s a much more engaging site, much more content-rich, a lot more places where you can leave comments and converse with us on the site. And got us some really cool tools and downloads and stuff coming too. So that’s been a couple of weeks in the works, which is very exciting to announce.

What this also means is we’re retiring PreneurMedia.tv, which has been the home of PreneurCast. We’re not retiring the podcast, don’t worry about that, just retiring the website it used to live at. We’re making it easier for everybody in having just PreneurMarketing.com be that central place for everything involved around the Preneur Community.

So if you like to read the transcripts and download the PDF version, or leave comments about a particular show, or got questions to ask, or check out the show notes and the links and all that stuff, PreneurMarketing.com is the place to go right now.

We’ve redirected all the old PreneurMedia.tv links and pages through to the new posts on PreneurMarketing.com, so all the old episodes are still available on PreneurMarketing.com as we speak. You can go back and listen to all of those shows and download them and all that goodness, which is super exciting! So PreneurMarketing.com – check it out and leave a comment and let us know your thoughts on the new appearance.

Dom: Absolutely. It’s a consolidation of all the different things we’ve been working on, to move this over to PreneurMarketing.com, and it’s a bit of a big move. We had all these separate pieces and now we’ve put them all back together, so it is a work in progress. We really would appreciate your feedback on this.

Pete’s had his team working around the clock to get this going. I think it’s a great new look, as you say content-oriented, and very, very stylish, sir, stylish. You may or may not have noticed – hopefully, listening to this episode, you might have picked up already on this change. As Pete says, if you’ve been following along, you’ll have seen the website.

It’s across the board rebrand. So one of the other things we’ve done is the podcast itself. Just to take you down a little bit into detail, the intros and outros have changed. Did you even notice? And the logo has changed. Did you even notice that?

Pete: Yup.

Dom: Just keeping you on your toes, folks. Just keep paying attention.

Pete: Well, we did that for a couple of reasons. Just to educate people as well around, one of the other reasons we did the logo change is that iTunes had changed their requirements or specifications around podcast logos. They now need 1400-by-1400-size graphic, which is absolutely huge.

But that’s so they can use that in other the forms of marketing to promote the most popular shows. We’ve had a couple of e-mails from iTunes saying, come on guys, get your stuff together and give us a new high-quality version of your logo. Unfortunately, the old photo we used was too small. It wouldn’t go to 1400-by-1400.

We were forced to do that by iTunes saying, we’re going to help promote your show to more listeners and feature you more regularly, and you need to do this icon change for that. It was an exciting thing too, again. So thank you for everyone who leaves comments on iTunes, and downloads through iTunes. That’s showing a lot of weight behind our show that iTunes wants to support. So thank you, current listeners, to help us get new listeners.

Dom: Indeed. That’s the big news, I guess. Folks, do go have a look around PreneurMarketing.com and give us your feedback on that, as always. For podcast listeners, the big news is that PreneurMedia.tv is no more. All those links now point to somewhere on PreneurMarketing.com.

Going forward, that’s where all the show notes, the downloads, and the all the commenting itself can be found. That said, Pete, let’s get into your conversation with Richie about his book, The Power of Starting Something Stupid.

Pete: Sounds great, and, for those of you who didn’t hear the end of last week’s episode, you might want to get a box of tissues for the first five or six minutes of this conversation.

[Pete’s interview with Richie Norton starts]

Pete: Richie, thank you so much for your time, buddy. I really do appreciate it.

Richie Norton: Oh, you’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me on, I appreciate it.

Pete: Well, the book’s been fantastic. I know, when I was first sent a review copy which was a few months ago now, and to coordinate our schedules together, but it’s well worth it. Very rarely does the first chapter of a book really move me as much as yours did. I’d love to get your words on the introduction to the book.

And here you set the frame because it’s a very powerful story, and, I think, very raw, that you gave away in that. I really appreciate that as a reader, and would love to start this conversation off with you sharing that story because I think it was so important.

Richie: Yeah, definitely. Well, I’ve been working on this book for about six years. And during that time, a lot of things happened. That’s where the first chapter starts, these crazy things that happened in my life. My brother-in-law, he was living on and off with us in Hawaii. It was the craziest thing.

One day, out of nowhere, he just didn’t wake up. He was only 21 years old, and he was my wife’s best friend, her only sibling. He had just become like my son. We had one boy at the time – two, two at that time when he passed away, I think. And he just loved them, snuggled them. He was just everything.

So when he passed away, it just shook us to the core. You think that you have all this time to do what you want to do. You think you’re going to be able to grow, and live, and go into retirement and fulfill all your dreams. But when someone passes away at 21, you realize that life is a lot shorter, or it can be, than you expect.

And that was a huge realization for us. A couple of years later we had, actually, it was, by now, our fourth son. We had three boys when Natalie’s brother Gavin (my wife Natalie, her brother Gavin) passed away, and we had our fourth son and we named him Gavin, after my wife’s brother Gavin.

He brought so much joy into our lives and almost filled that hole that was there as much as he could, in his own little way, that his uncle Gavin had left. Unfortunately, after a few weeks into his short life, he caught something called pertussis, which is also known as whooping cough.

It was the craziest thing. We went to the hospital thinking that everything would be fine. We’d been in the hospital before, saying he’s having trouble breathing, and they said he was going to stay for the one night, and it just got really bad. They ended up admitting us to the hospital, and we thought we were going to be in and out of there, but we ended up staying for quite a while.

It came to the point, about a week into it at the hospital, that the doctors let us know he wasn’t going to make it. He had all these wires in him, and it was just so hard to even see what our son was going through. They let us know that, when it came to it, they could try to resuscitate him, but it would be violent and he would ultimately pass away, anyway, because it was just too much on his fragile little body.

And so we decided that in his last moments of his life, that we would just hold him. My wife would hold him, we’d sing him a lullaby, and I had my hand on his heart and just feeling for those last beats until he slipped away. And, gosh, the world sure felt heavier then, leaving the hospital empty-handed.

Again, I just realized that life is so short. It’s too short not to act on those ideas that press on our minds, and to live a life in a way that we don’t have regret, and to live for those that didn’t have a chance to live a full life. So that’s where the book starts, and now, then, we can go from there.

Pete: Yeah, I remember reading that and that was when I had my first son. I think he was about 10 weeks old when I started reading your book. It really shook me, which was amazing. And the rest of the book goes on to tell some amazing stories. Let’s move on to a happier time. You referred to this whole principle, that is the foundation of the book, as Gavin’s Law.

Richie: Yeah. So I say, Gavin’s Law, which is live to start, start to live. Because when you live to start those – what I call stupid ideas, you really do start living. Things start happening and one thing leads to another. So many people are just like the living dead.

They just fumble through their life, and they’re just moping around. But when you embrace those ideas, and you live to start them, you really do start living. That’s Gavin’s Law.

Pete: You take that principle of stories throughout the whole book, don’t you, and share a whole bunch of stories of people who have started something stupid and then taken a big lesson out of that? What was your favorite story out of all the research you did and the ones you share in the book? Was there a favorite story?

Richie: Well, honestly, they’re all my favorites because they’re all so funny. From the guy that had the idea to sell those – back in the late ’70s or early ’80s – the guy that had the idea to sell used Levis that he was buying for pennies in the United States, and was shipping them over to Europe and Asia, and selling them for hundreds of dollars.

It was the craziest stupid idea, but it worked, and he made tons of money doing it. And then there’s stories of the average person that either changed their major to do something that not everyone thought they should do, but it turned out to be something great.

But then there’s always these famous people, everybody from the things like the telephone, things like Twitter, for example, the car, the Model T. All these things were stupid ideas that turned out to be smart ideas. One of my favorite stories is the story of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

He was working on Wall Street, and he had this idea to sell books online. He told his boss about this idea, and his boss said, “Let’s go for a walk in the park.” And he took him on a two-hour walk in Central Park, and basically tried to talk him out of doing this idea.

He said, in essence, it’s okay, but for someone who doesn’t already have a good job. It became this crazy stupid idea for Jeff Bezos. What was he going to do? Was he going to keep his job, or was he going to start this thing, or what was he going to do? He ended up asking himself just one question.

He asked himself, will I regret it when I’m 80? And he decided, because he would regret not starting this idea of his when he was 80, that he would quit his job in the middle of the year, which was another insane time to quit because you don’t get your annual bonus in the financial industry like that.

He ended up packing up his bags, he quit his job and drove from New York to Washington and started Amazon. And the rest is history. He changed the world. So, stupid – it’s not that it’s inherently stupid. But sometimes, it’s the circumstances, it’s our belief system, it’s what people think, it’s unconventional, it’s creative. But in reality, stupid is the new smart.

Pete: Absolutely, absolutely. I think that’s beyond the Bezos test you refer to as. I think it’s brilliant. It’s a sign that I don’t know where I heard it before, but I’ve heard that before. Usually, in my life and also with people I talk about, is that when you’re 80, will you regret it?

And this is a whole range of things, whether it’s starting a business, or learning a skill. Most people, I think, when you talk to people when they’re 80, saying, what do you regret, they don’t regret what they’ve done, they regret what they didn’t do. I think that’s a starting point people have heard before, but people don’t act on it as much as they should.

Richie: Yeah. It’s totally true. I was doing some retirement consulting for a number of years. I was president of a financial services company, and I would interview people that were approaching retirement. I asked them about their life, what was good and what was bad.

What was interesting was that a lot of them told me, they waited their whole lives until they thought they’d have a time when they’d have more education or more money, or more spare time on their hands. And they waited until retirement to do these things they want to do, only to find they still needed more time, more education, more money.

Or their circumstances had changed. Their spouse had passed away, or they were unhealthy, they didn’t have the resources they thought they’d have. And so it’s so important that when we have these so-called stupid ideas, that we just don’t wait. Sometimes we put it off. I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later, I’ll do it later. But later is sometimes too late.

Like going back to Gavin’s Law, for one, we might not live that long. Or, if we do, the circumstances in our life are going to change. The only time that we are guaranteed is right now. So if there’s an idea that’s pressing on your mind, even if it seems to be “stupid,” now is the time to act on it. And it can change your life and change the lives of people everywhere.

Pete: Let me ask you a question. I’m sure you’ve been asked before. You touched on this in the book. How do you differentiate a stupid idea in this context of Gavin’s Law, compared to it’s being foolish?

Richie: Right, right, right. That’s a really good question. In the book, I talk about the difference between, I call it healthy stupid and unhealthy stupid. And, obviously, there are certain things that are stupid, things that would hurt yourself or hurt other people. But then it starts to get gray, where you’re like, “Yeah, but I might lose money.

This is risky, or I might lose face. I might be shamed in some way.” And that’s where it gets risky. So the honest answer is nobody knows. You don’t know if it’s going to be successful or not. Because a lot of times people say that it was stupid because it wasn’t successful. But how many successes came out of other unsuccessful pursuits?

We learn from these failures, we build on top of them and move forward. Then I go back to that, will I regret that when I’m 80? If you’re going to regret something, you would rather live doing it yet fail at it, than you would live and look back your whole life, I wish I would have done that one thing.

Pete: The difference for me, and I love your European experience on this point, is that the topic of the book is about starting something stupid. I think the biggest thing is starting. I want to talk to talk to you about starting in a moment because that’s something you wrote about, which I love. But about starting something stupid, not executing the idea stupidly.

It’s a slight differentiation. I think a lot of people, when they think, ‘start something stupid,’ it just means I’m going to go and try to paint on the wall and see what sticks. No. It’s about getting the guts to take that first step. And then, once you have the motion, be intelligent and execute that in a smart way, not in a stupid way.

Richie: Exactly. People like to say that entrepreneurs are risk-takers. While that has merit, entrepreneurs are risk-mitigators. They’re looking for ways to reduce that risk in every step of the way. They’re just brave enough to move forward and have the courage, even though it might not work out. So you have to do that when you’re starting a stupid idea, for sure. I totally agree.

Pete: When it comes to starting, I’d love to break down your definition, or term, or principle around starting.

Richie: Yeah. I learned that, through my research, successful people start things. That was obvious. And what was interesting was, successful people didn’t just start anything, a lot of times they started something they thought maybe was stupid or crazy. I also realized that they all had these certain characteristics of a way that they would build a network and create connections and start to work towards making the project happen.

What I call it is START. So the acronym for START is Serve, Thank, Ask, Receive, and Trust. S-T-A-R-T: Serve, Thank, Ask, Receive, and Trust. People ask me a lot of times, where do I start? A lot of times I’ll say, start with service. When you start serving other people, not only will you make connections with them, but you’ll start to learn the ropes.

And when you thank people, even for the opportunity to serve them, you start to solidify those relationships, and you start to create this virtuous upward cycle of serving and thanking. People start serving and thanking you in return. Then you get to a point where you can ask.

You can ask people for help. Whether that be something financial, or mentorship, or a connection. But when you ask, you want it to be a genuine ask, what I call mission matching, where when you ask for help, you’re asking for something that is in line with something that they already want to do.

So you’re matching your mission with their mission, and it becomes this – everybody is winning at the same time. The next one is receive, and you want to be open to receiving that help. Sometimes people will say, hey, I need some help. But when the help comes, they’re like, “No, no, no. It’s okay, I don’t need your help.”

It’s like in American football. When a quarterback throws the ball to the receiver, the objective is that he catches it and runs with it, and scores. There’s a difference between imagine that a receiver just dropped the ball on purpose. It defeats the whole game. Life is, in some ways, a game.

When people are offering you something and you receive it, meaning you take it and you do something worthwhile or score with it, so to speak, everybody again wins. There’s a difference between accepting, which is just like, “Oh, thank you for that gift,” and receiving, which is taking that gift and doing something more with it. Right? So, Serve, Think, Ask, Receive, and the last is Trust.

When you go through this process, you want to trust the process. Too many people are afraid. “I can’t share my idea because somebody is going to steal it, I can’t trust that person because, somehow, they’re going to stab me in the back.” But the secret to trusting is you have to trust first. If you don’t trust others, other people won’t trust you, and trust is the glue that puts this whole process together, and being able to start your stupid idea.

Pete: Absolutely. And that’s what it’s all about. It’s just getting that action and that momentum building up. Some of the stuff you do talk about further in the book, which I want to talk about, is this momentum-building scenario, or at least getting that ball rolling.

One of the things you talk about is destroying the waiting place as a thing you need to do to get that momentum started. I’d love you to tell people about that for our listeners if you can.

Richie: Yeah, so, destroying the waiting place – I had a meeting with this investment banker. I was trying to raise money for a venture. I was really young, and I was living in Hawaii. I didn’t have any money or anything, but I had a nice lifestyle and here I am talking with this filthy rich investment banker, asking him for money.

He looks at me and says, “I’ve been working my whole life to be able to get back to where my college days were where I didn’t have all those responsibilities, get back to a place like Hawaii, where you’re at right now.” And I realized, oh my gosh, he’s been waiting and working his whole life.

He’d been waiting his whole life to be able to be doing what I was doing at a really young age. And I wasn’t doing anything special, but his dreams, his life had been put on hold. He essentially pushed pause on life. And so, it’s essential that we, again, destroy this waiting place, so to speak.

As I mentioned, right now, this time, is the only time that we’re really guaranteed. Try to do something in the future. Right now, try to do something in the future. You can’t. The future is always one second, one minute, one year ahead of us, and so we have to act in the present.

But we trick ourselves and say, we can do that thing in the future, and then we never end up doing it, and then we end up regretting not doing it. So the idea is, if you have this big picture dream, can you break it down into small, manageable parts?

And if you can break it down into little pieces, which piece can you start with first? It might be as small as making a phone call or sending an e-mail, but doing that one thing then creates this, what’s called the processional effect, where one thing leads to another. The e-mail – you sent an e-mail, the e-mail comes back. Oh wow, now we can learn something, maybe we can create a project.

See, projects, I really believe in them as a way to get your stupid idea going because they have a beginning and an end. So you can test out your idea, see if it’s going to work or not. Is it a stupid idea, or is it a stupid smart idea? You can then experiment with it. And. if it works, move forward. If it doesn’t, move on and build upon those things.

Pete: Is that the form of leaning into stupid that you talk about?

Richie: Exactly, that’s leaning into stupid. It’s both something you do actively by starting small projects, leaning into stupid, but also mentally. A lot of people, as soon as they feel like – people like to put a label on things. “Oh, that’s a stupid idea. Therefore, I won’t do it.” A lot of times, people will run from stupid because they’re afraid of being shamed, and they end up missing out on huge opportunities.

Whereas, other people who have been largely successful leaned into stupid and unconventional wisdom, and then embraced it by starting these small projects. And one thing led to another. Then they were able to create something huge. Even things like eBay. People said eBay was stupid, and look where it is now.

Pete: This is the thing. It’s not about packing up the house and the kids, leaving the school, and driving across the other side of the country to start your idea. That is unhealthy stupid.

Richie: That’s unhealthy stupid. A lot of people think, I tell some of these stories of what people have done, like Jeff Bezos and whatnot, but that doesn’t mean you have to quit your job and travel across the country or the world to go do something. That was him.

You can do something on the side. Start small, start with one now. To be honest, Jeff Bezos didn’t just jump ship. He had done tons of research before he made that decision.

Pete: Yes, he’s done the research, he’d done the due diligence. And yeah, he had some venture behind him and some capital, and was about to roll it out with somewhat mitigated risk. Obviously, over time, it grew. But for years, not making any money, but he had that business model in place and people willing to back him.

Those people saying it was a silly idea, it wasn’t a smart idea, it was a stupid idea, it wasn’t going to succeed. But he had enough people believing in him and supporting that idea that Amazon is where it is today. Pretty much everyone who listens to this conversation will at least think of Amazon once in the last 12 months, which is a phenomenal statistic.

We’ve got audience all around the globe. I get deliveries from Amazon almost every week here in Australia, and it’s just phenomenal that it’s one ginormous – almost a monopoly that’s built out of a stupid idea.

Richie: It’s unbelievable, it really is.

Pete: So let me ask you this, Richie. This is a question that we ask everyone who comes on the show. What’s the one question I haven’t asked you yet that I should be asking you?

Richie: That’s a good question. Well, I guess you could ask, how do you overcome the fear? How do you overcome the fear of starting a stupid idea?

Pete: I think that it is a huge fear, particularly because they do have what is said to be a big task to take on. It’s more of the failures, how am I going to look to my family and my wife, and my friends? So, from your perspective, your experience, and the research you’ve done, how do you overcome that?

Richie: The model I built out in the book is that, in order to start your stupid idea, you have to work first on the psychology part of it, which is overcoming fear, pride, negative pride, and procrastination. When you do that, you can step into being authentic. It’s like breaking out of a shell and being yourself.

Imagine if you’re always scared and too proud to start something new and different, and always procrastinating it, can you really be yourself? But imagine if you had no fear, no pride, no procrastination, who would you be? You would be you. You’d be the real you. You’d be authentic. And so, I like to talk about overcoming fear with this example of a surfer. I’m a surfer, love surfing.

Pete: You’re a Hawaiian boy, you have to.

Richie: Is that right? Exactly. I have this friend, he rides the thick waves, the 20-foot-plus waves. One time, he was out at Sunset Beach in Hawaii in Oahu. He caught this massive 20-foot-plus wave, and ended throwing him over the falls of the wave, and he flew from the top to the bottom.

The board swung up, and it came down like an axe and chopped him right in the leg and broke his femur. He ended up pummeled over and over and over by the waves that kept coming, and he thought he was going to die. Fortunately, somebody came, helped him get out of that impact zone and onto the shore, and he was okay.

That’s a scary story, but what’s interesting is he got back in the water just a few weeks later with a new, shiny metal pole in his leg. And so I asked him, I said, do you have a death wish? How are you not scared? Do you have no fear? And what he said was really interesting.

He said, actually, I am scared. Everyone out there is scared. But he just loves surfing. His purpose, his why, was bigger, so to speak, than the fear. So the first part of overcoming fear is your why, for what you’re doing needs to be larger than your fear. You need to be more scared of not doing it than you are of doing it.

The second thing is, he didn’t just get out there and start surfing 20-foot waves. If he didn’t know how to swim, if you didn’t know how to swim, could you even go out there in the first place? He started, obviously, learning how to swim, learning how to ride one, two-foot waves, five-foot waves, and then building up to 10, 15-foot, 20-foot-size waves.

And along that curve of learning how to ride these smaller waves, he would fail. He would fall down over and over and over. And he built up a tolerance for failure, which helped him overcome the fear. So, when he was falling on one-foot, two-foot, five-foot, 10-foot waves, he was able to then be strong enough, so to speak, to fall off the 20-foot wave, and mentally say, “Oh, I can get back out there.

I know what I did wrong. I can do it right this time.” So, bringing that back to practical matters for us, when we have a task, if we can take that big picture dream and break it down into small manageable parts, take that big fear, break it down into small parts, and do the first part that you can overcome.

And then when you can move from that part that you can overcome to the next part, you build, incrementally, these successes and failures to overcome that fear. So you’ve just got to start small. Start with the one. Start with that one thing that’s right in front of you.

Pete: I love it, Richie. Well, that’s been a fantastic glimpse into Gavin’s Law and, obviously, the book. I really do appreciate your time, mate, and thank you so much. The book is The Power of Starting Something Stupid by Richie Norton. Again, Richie, thank you so much for your time.

Richie: Oh, it’s my honor. Thank you so much. It was wonderful talking to you.

[Pete’s interview with Richie ends]

Dom: Pete, that was a great conversation, lots of great examples and little stories. I almost felt an affinity with Richie and his story about living in Hawaii and being a surfer, whatever, with me living by the coast, as I do. I almost felt I can join in.

Pete: Love it, love it. He’s a remarkable guy and it’s a remarkable book. Obviously, he’s gone through a lot. With Eli being seven months old now and a little bit younger when we recorded that conversation because it was recorded a few weeks back, it was hitting very hard home to me at that time.

It takes a lot of courage to share stories like that. To get through a book that’s fantastic, and just loving to help Richie share a message and things like that, I really encourage you to go and check it out, Richie’s book, and ideally, listen to The Power of Starting Something Stupid through our sponsor Audible. Those who haven’t taken action yet, shame on you.

AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast is there, ready and waiting for you guys to go and download a free audiobook from Audible. They have an offer there for our PreneurCast Community. You can go to AudibleTrial.com/PreneurCast, sign up, and try their service, and get a free audiobook. Richie’s book is available on Audible, and is a great place to start.

Dom: Indeed, indeed. I couldn’t help myself when I was reading that and listening to the conversation, especially when I was listening to the conversation between you and Richie. But I couldn’t help thinking that this is a guy that agrees with us about our JFDI methodology.

Pete: Yes, absolutely. Just Effing Do It.

Dom: Yup. Okay folks, little bit of a side note about the move – the consolidation to everything to PreneurMarketing.com. We would normally remind you at the end of the show that we run competitions over PreneurMarketing.com/Win, and we regularly change the competition depending on what we’ve got to give away.

It’s usually a book or a number of books from the authors that we have the conversations with. When they come on the show we ask them to give us something to give to you, the listeners, to say thank you. The last competition we were running was Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers, and we’ve had a bit of feedback about that competition.

“Fabulous, thanks to your really great show,” and all that stuff. With the move to PreneurMarketing.com, there were some technical issues, and the competition system went a bit haywire. For those of you who are really keen on joining that competition, it’s still live.

We’re going to leave it live a little bit longer to give everybody a chance to enter the competition to win a copy of the Copy Hackers differentiation book, The Startup Guide to Differentiation. So that’s over at PreneurMarketing.com/Win. When we end that competition, we’ll start another one.

If you’re listening to this down the line, you come back to us later on and you hear it, that competition page will always be there over at PreneurMarketing.com/Win. It will just change what it is that you can win, so go and check it out.

With that, a reminder that we’re consolidating all of PreneurCast shows on PreneurMarketing.com. PreneurMedia.tv is being shut down, we’re redirecting everything to PreneurMarketing.com. That’s where you will find downloads, show notes, links, all the things we talk about in the show, the transcripts.

And this is where you can leave us a comment either below the post or, hopefully, when the text settles itself down with a little SpeakPipe audio track that you can leave. As always, you can leave us a review or a comment and feedback on iTunes, which we do appreciate. So, folks, hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as we did, and thanks for joining us.

Win Stuff!
We are now regularly receiving copies of books (and other goodies) from the authors we feature to give away to PreneurCast listeners.
To enter our current competition, just visit: http://www.preneurmarketing.com/win.
Keep checking back for the latest competition and prizes!

Leave A Comment + Win !

Each week we reward one lucky commenter with a personally signed edition of Pete’s first book ‘How To Turn Your Million Dollar Idea Into A Reality’. Just contribute to the community and leave your thoughts about this (or any) post in the comments section below. When you win, we’ll send you a message and ship you a personally signed book.

Debra Hilton

That was an amazing episode! Gavin’s story added some very powerful impact – especially when you think about how common that sort of tragedy is. We think we’ve tamed death these days, but we haven’t – and we can’t. However, the other really important thing he said (amongst a great deal of value), is the importance of failure – and learning to get up and try again. Our education system (here in Australia) doesn’t do much to nurture that. Kids are given certificates and awards for nothing, so there is very little opportunity to fail. We’re handicapping them for life in some ways.

Pete Williams is an entrepreneur, author, and marketer from Melbourne, Australia.

Before being honored “Australia’s Richard Branson” in media publications all over the continent, Pete was just 21 years old when he sold Australia’s version of Yankee Stadium, The Melbourne Cricket Ground For Under $500! Don’t believe it? You will! Check out the story in the FAQ section (it really is our most asked question).

Since then, he’s done some cool stuff like write the international smash hit ‘How to Turn Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality’ (+ the upcoming ‘It’s Not About the Product‘) and he’s created a bunch of companies including Infiniti Telecommunications, On Hold Advertising, Simply Headsets and Preneur Group.

Lots of other people think he’s pretty good too! He’s been announced as the Global Runner-Up in the JCI Creative Young Entrepreneur Awards for 2009, the Southern Region Finalist in the Ernst & Young 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year, and a member of SmartCompany’s Top 30 Under 30.

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